What sort of Christian are you?

I don’t like labels very much. Sure, they can be useful. Humans seem to have this insatiable desire to understand the world, and that often means categorising things. Saying what an object is also gives us information about what it isn’t.

The problem is that labels always simplify the thing we’re trying to describe. That’s why they’re so useful—they give us a way of ordering the apparently chaotic. But if the label is too general, we can either lose information about the thing we’re describing, or we can inadvertently add information that doesn’t belong.

For example, if we’re talking about politics I might be described as ‘left-wing.’ That designation implies a lot about me. You can guess what I think about a range of issues—economic, social, moral and so on. Yet if you were to dig a little deeper you’d find that on some issues my attitudes are more in keeping with a traditional ‘right-wing’ stance.

Labels aren’t always that helpful.

A few days ago I came upon an internet quiz that asks the question, What’s your theological worldview? I took the test, partly out of boredom and partly out of curiosity. Here’s my result:

You scored as Emergent/Postmodern You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don’t think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this. Emergent/Postmodern 86% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 79% Neo orthodox 75% Modern Liberal 57% Classical Liberal 57% Charismatic/Pentecostal 43% Roman Catholic 29% Reformed Evangelical 21% Fundamentalist 7%

I’m pretty impressed with this quiz. I like the way it rates you according to a number of different labels, and gives you a mark of 1-100% on each. I’m most impressed with the scores I got: if I were to put those rubrics into an order of most applicable to least applicable, that’s the order I would probably have put them in. So in this wide ranging sample of one subject, the test seems to be quite accurate.

Why not have a crack at it? Leave a comment and let me know how you did.